Fortunately for all of us in Texas, we are clearly on the road to success. Our marketplace is built on an incredibly solid foundation and infrastructure growth, including more than 150 miles of toll roads built in the last six years and another 100 miles of toll projects in the works—$14 billion in new road projects under construction in DFW alone. During the past year, Dallas and Houston combined for 10 percent of the country’s net job creation, and DFW’s current growth rate of 1 million every 10 years has us tracking to become the the United States’ third-largest metro by 2020.
However, the drivers to our success extend well beyond our roads. Our technology infrastructure, both here and around the globe, is growing faster than ever. The number of internet devices hit 1,000 in 1984, a million in 1992 and a billion in 2008. It is estimated that more unique information will be generated this year than the previous 5,000 years combined, and the amount of new technical information doubles every two years. The new normal is a dynamic marketplace, where change is the only constant and, with the rate of change of knowledge, we likely have not even heard about many of the things that we will be aggressively adapting to five years from now.
As such, we must constantly integrate our digital and physical strategies as we adapt to our rapidly changing world—continuously upgrading our technology systems, data extrapolation, presentations and other means of making our information more abundant, accessible, deliverable, and robust.
The real estate industry will certainly continue to be impacted by technology. But whatever we do to remain on the front edge of the tech curve, the inefficient aspects of our business will remain our most valuable means of differentiating ourselves. We must continue to listen intently to our customers, understand their key objectives, and deliver above and beyond their expectations. Our knowledge, experience, connection to, and capacity to collaborate with, our clients are invaluable. Nothing new.
